There are over 20 million people in the United States and tens of millions world wide, who have diabetes. Diabetes is a disease in which blood glucose levels are too high, and in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin, which is a hormone that is needed to convert sugar, starches and other food substance into energy needed for daily life.
It is important to understand the effects of insulin dosage, eating habits, exercise, and medication on blood glucose levels to improve diabetes control. When using a system, where a real-time continuous blood glucose level monitoring system is connected to an insulin pump, it is possible to manage diabetes better than without a real-time continuous blood glucose level monitoring. With real-time glucose monitoring it is possible to follow blood glucose levels around the clock, discover the effects of diet, exercise, and medication on blood glucose levels, and help prevent too low and too high blood glucose levels. It is obvious that the faster the information about blood glucose level reaches the patient the faster the patient can react and avoid complications for example by injecting insulin to keep blood glucose as near the normal level as possible.
It is obvious that diabetes control is beneficial; Diabetes Control and Complications Trials (DCCT) have showed in 1993 that those patients who kept their blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible had a tremendous decrease in their risk for long-term complications of diabetes. Risk of diabetic eye disease was reduced by 76%, kidney disease by 50%, and nerve disease by 60%.
Portable medical devices having wireless data communication capabilities are especially suitable for continuous diabetes control. These wireless medical devices are deployed in a network to transfer data between two or more separate medical devices.
Current real-time continuous glucose monitoring systems have relatively high power consumption, long response time to changes, the response time for example to changed blood glucose level, being few minutes. Further, for example in case of interference a master device may not get a data packet at all from a slave device and stays in an active state for few minutes longer, waiting the packet from the slave device, which, of course, consumes a great deal of power. In addition, current monitoring systems need bigger devices due to their large power consumption which creates a need for a battery of a relatively large size or for a rechargeable battery.
There is a need for a system comprising portable devices having lower power consumption, shorter response times, more flexible transmitting time periods, and synchronized connection.